Arts & Culture | Film

When “Rabies,” the debut feature film of co-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, played the Tribeca Film Festival two years ago, it marked a rare excursion into an action genre film for the Israeli film industry.

In 1996, Marian Marzynski wrote and directed a remarkable documentary, “Shtetl,” a three-hour-long film about his visit with a close American friend to the Polish village in which the friend’s parents were born.

Two new films opening this weekend at the Quad Cinema offer riffs on classic clichés of 20th-century Jewish-American masculinity: the radical firebrand and the nebbish. Unsurprisingly, it’s the rabble-rouser who merits our attention, but the nebbish is given a sufficiently unusual to be interesting too.

Louis Malle’s 1981 film “My Dinner with Andre” was about as unlikely an art film hit as one could imagine. A film that consisted of a pair of downtown theater mavens talking about their art and their lives in a restaurant for nearly two hours ... well, it just didn’t sound like a blockbuster.

“Dorfman in Love,” a new feature film opening on March 22, directed by Bradley Leong from an original screenplay by Wendy Kout, betrays its true origins almost from its opening shots of a sun-gilded Los Angeles and its suburbs.